65 karma · joined December 4, 2014
I'm using FireFox 86.0 on MacOS 11.2 (Apple M1 chip).
There's no claim to have changed the complexity class, so"exponentially faster" just means the problem is still exponentially in problem size, but the exponent is smaller.
From the looks of it, though, it is a nice result because it has pretty wide applicability.
As other people pointed out, you may need a factor of 100-1000 more physical qubits to get as many logical qubits.
It's fine to make approximations to avoid exponential scaling, but applying function approximators essentially randomly won't get you anywhere. This is then compounded by the fact that the functional framework you're starting from is not a first-principles approach.
Until there is QMC for drug discovery, it will all be hype.
Is a cluster of Dwaves faster than a cluster of CPUs? Maybe at the two problems Google looked at.
If you want to make a comparison between currently available hardware, then the metric should be some combination of speed, power usage, space, cost, etc.
If they want to make a claim about the scaling ratio between D-wave and classical algorithms, then this linear term would cancel.